HELP! Lost my project -- had it saved in a tutorial directory during an update...

[brianh99915335]

For the past few weeks I've been working on an animation, right after jumping back into AE after a 10 year (yes) break.  I did one or two tutorials, and steaming right ahead, saved my new project in the Adobe tutorial directory.  (Users/Shared/Adobe/After Effects CC 2019/Learn Panel/project-payloads/playlist_the-basics)  I had just been using "Open Recent" to load my project and not taking much notice of where it was.  I installed the June 2019 update today and the "Open Recent" link is broken (Error: Not Found) and the project is missing from the directory.  Is there any recovering this file?  Help!

[Dave Merchant · Accepted solution]

Unfortunately not. Updates have free rein to do anything they want to their own installation folders, and automatic saves in After Effects are (1) not enabled by default, and (2) normally in a subfolder next to the project file, so equally vulnerable. If you had enabled auto-save and changed the location to somewhere permanent, then you'd be able to recover from there.

The only case where user-modified stuff is (or should be!) preserved is when upgrading between CC versions (e.g. CC2018 to CC2019) because they use separate folder names. Every sub-version with the same year code overwrites the same locations, there's no warning about user-generated stuff being eaten along the way.

It would be nice if AE threw a warning if your project folder is within the installation tree, but it doesn't.

[brianh99915335]

THANK YOU.  Not the news I wanted but the news I expected.  Don't be like me, folks.  Don't be like me.